Political Junkies

Author : Claire Bond Potter
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781541646223
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Political Junkies written by Claire Bond Potter and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For years, we were promised the Internet would make our politics more open and inclusive. And its influence has certainly been decisive: the 2016 election was debated, won, and lost on social media and the Internet. But with Facebook and Twitter embroiled in controversy over privacy issues, ongoing revelations about foreign interference through hacking and social media trolls, and coverage of controversial viral videos monopolizing the attention of the press, it's increasingly unclear whether the Internet is a benign public arena, let alone one for the public good. In Political Junkies, historian Claire Potter explains how we got here by situating today's online politics in a much longer history of new media technologies repurposed for political purposes, including independent newsletters, talk radio, direct mail, and cable television. Beginning in the 1950s, pioneers across the political spectrum, from I.F. Stone to Phyllis Schlafly, used these tools to create increasingly influential political media that were entrepreneurial, alarming, and sharply partisan. Simultaneously, traditional media outlets embraced the same technologies and expanded their ideas about what counted as political news. Cheap and free digital tools introduced in the 1990s simply further sped transformations already under way: email became an inexpensive form of direct mail, blogging updated the political newsletter for a wider audience, and YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter ads displaced vintage campaign commercials. The results were evident in the insurgent presidential campaigns of John McCain and Howard Dean, the hashtag activism of the early 2010s, and of course, the rise of Donald Trump. The Internet and social media made the populist insurgency of 2016 possible, but so too did a far longer transformation in our political media. In today's online world, political engagement has never been greater, but trust in political institutions and processes has never been more fragile. To understand why, Potter argues, we must avoid the shock of the present and look to history. For anyone lost in the online wilderness or the thread of some political argument, Political Junkies is essential reading for understanding how the Internet became the defining feature of 21st century politics"--

Author : Claire Bond Potter
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 1541645006
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Political Junkies written by Claire Bond Potter and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging history of seventy years of change in political media, and how it transformed -- and fractured -- American politics With fake news on Facebook, trolls on Twitter, and viral outrage everywhere, it's easy to believe that the internet changed politics entirely. In Political Junkies, historian Claire Bond Potter shows otherwise, revealing the roots of today's dysfunction by situating online politics in a longer history of alternative political media. From independent newsletters in the 1950s to talk radio in the 1970s to cable television in the 1980s, pioneers on the left and right developed alternative media outlets that made politics more popular, and ultimately, more partisan. When campaign operatives took up e-mail, blogging, and social media, they only supercharged these trends. At a time when political engagement has never been greater and trust has never been lower, Political Junkies is essential reading for understanding how we got here.

Author : Eitan Hersh
Publisher : Scribner
ISBN 13 : 1982116781
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Politics Is for Power written by Eitan Hersh and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant condemnation of political hobbyism—treating politics like entertainment—and a call to arms for well-meaning, well-informed citizens who consume political news, but do not take political action. Who is to blame for our broken politics? The uncomfortable answer to this question starts with ordinary citizens with good intentions. We vote (sometimes) and occasionally sign a petition or attend a rally. But we mainly “engage” by consuming politics as if it’s a sport or a hobby. We soak in daily political gossip and eat up statistics about who’s up and who’s down. We tweet and post and share. We crave outrage. The hours we spend on politics are used mainly as pastime. Instead, we should be spending the same number of hours building political organizations, implementing a long-term vision for our city or town, and getting to know our neighbors, whose votes will be needed for solving hard problems. We could be accumulating power so that when there are opportunities to make a difference—to lobby, to advocate, to mobilize—we will be ready. But most of us who are spending time on politics today are focused inward, choosing roles and activities designed for our short-term pleasure. We are repelled by the slow-and-steady activities that characterize service to the common good. In Politics Is for Power, pioneering and brilliant data analyst Eitan Hersh shows us a way toward more effective political participation. Aided by political theory, history, cutting-edge social science, as well as remarkable stories of ordinary citizens who got off their couches and took political power seriously, this book shows us how to channel our energy away from political hobbyism and toward empowering our values.

Author : Ilya Somin
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804789312
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Democracy and Political Ignorance written by Ilya Somin and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-02 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the biggest problems with modern democracy is that most of the public is usually ignorant of politics and government. Often, many people understand that their votes are unlikely to change the outcome of an election and don't see the point in learning much about politics. This may be rational, but it creates a nation of people with little political knowledge and little ability to objectively evaluate what they do know. In Democracy and Political Ignorance, Ilya Somin mines the depths of ignorance in America and reveals the extent to which it is a major problem for democracy. Somin weighs various options for solving this problem, arguing that political ignorance is best mitigated and its effects lessened by decentralizing and limiting government. Somin provocatively argues that people make better decisions when they choose what to purchase in the market or which state or local government to live under, than when they vote at the ballot box, because they have stronger incentives to acquire relevant information and to use it wisely.

Author : William Safire
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199711119
Total Pages : 862 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Safire's Political Dictionary written by William Safire and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-31 with total page 862 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it comes to the vagaries of language in American politics, its uses and abuses, its absurdities and ever-shifting nuances, its power to confound, obscure, and occasionally to inspire, William Safire is the language maven we most readily turn to for clarity, guidance, and penetrating, sometimes lacerating, wit. Safire's Political Dictionary is a stem-to-stern updating and expansion of the Language of Politics, which was first published in 1968 and last revised in 1993, long before such terms as Hanging Chads, 9/11 and the War on Terror became part of our everyday vocabulary. Nearly every entry in that renowned work has been revised and updated and scores of completely new entries have been added to produce an indispensable guide to the political language being used and abused in America today. Safire's definitions--discursive, historically aware, and often anecdotal--bring a savvy perspective to our colorful political lingo. Indeed, a Safire definition often reads like a mini-essay in political history, and readers will come away not only with a fuller understanding of particular words but also a richer knowledge of how politics works, and fails to work, in America. From Axis of Evil, Blame Game, Bridge to Nowhere, Triangulation, and Compassionate Conservatism to Islamofascism, Netroots, Earmark, Wingnuts and Moonbats, Slam Dunk, Doughnut Hole, and many others, this language maven explains the origin of each term, how and by whom and for what purposes it has been used or twisted, as well as its perceived and real significance. For anyone who wants to cut through the verbal haze that surrounds so much of American political discourse, Safire's Political Dictionary offers a work of scholarship, wit, insiderhood and resolute bipartisanship.

Author : Blake Eskin
Publisher : Villard Books
ISBN 13 : 9780375750113
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Book of Political Lists written by Blake Eskin and published by Villard Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the creators of America's hottest and savviest political magazine, "George", comes this entertaining, stimulating, provocative, and indispensable reference to who's who and what's what in American politics. Line drawings throughout.

Author : Yanna Krupnikov
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108831125
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Other Divide written by Yanna Krupnikov and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The key to understanding the current wave of American political division is the attention people pay to politics.

Author : Hunter S. Thompson
Publisher : Ballantine Books
ISBN 13 : 0307826635
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Better Than Sex written by Hunter S. Thompson and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2012-08-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hunter S. Thompson is to drug-addled, stream-of-consciousness, psycho-political black humor what Forrest Gump is to idiot savants." --The Philadelphia Inquirer Since his 1972 trailblazing opus, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson has reported the election story in his truly inimitable, just-short-of-libel style. In Better than Sex, Thompson hits the dusty trail again--without leaving home--yet manages to deliver a mind-bending view of the 1992 presidential campaign--in all of its horror, sacrifice, lust, and dubious glory. Complete with faxes sent to and received by candidate Clinton's top aides, and 100 percent pure gonzo screeds on Richard Nixon, George Bush, and Oliver North, here is the most true-blue campaign tell-all ever penned by man or beast. "[Thompson] delivers yet another of his trademark cocktail mixes of unbelievable tales and dark observations about the sausage grind that is the U.S. presidential sweepstakes. Packed with egocentric anecdotes, musings and reprints of memos, faxes and scrawled handwritten notes (Memorable." --Los Angeles Daily News "What endears Hunter Thompson to anyone who reads him is that he will say what others are afraid to (.[He] is a master at the unlikely but invariably telling line that sums up a political figure (.In a year when all politics is--to much of the public--a tendentious and pompous bore, it is time to read Hunter Thompson." --Richmond Times-Dispatch "While Tom Wolfe mastered the technique of being a fly on the wall, Thompson mastered the art of being a fly in the ointment. He made himself a part of every story, made no apologies for it and thus produced far more honest reporting than any crusading member of the Fourth Estate (. Thompson isn't afraid to take the hard medicine, nor is he bashful about dishing it out (.He is still king of beasts, and his apocalyptic prophecies seldom miss their target." --Tulsa World "This is a very, very funny book. No one can ever match Thompson in the vitriol department, and virtually nobody escapes his wrath." --The Flint Journal

Author : Michael Crane
Publisher : SP Books
ISBN 13 : 9781561718917
Total Pages : 652 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Political Junkie Handbook written by Michael Crane and published by SP Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This easy-to-use book is designed to inform the American public about the political system that influences much of their lives

Author : Kathleen Hall Jamieson
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Everything You Think You Know About Politics...and Why You're Wrong written by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and published by . This book was released on 2000-06-23 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A media expert and network commentator examines the welter of misinformation--generated by politicians and the media alike--that surrounds political campaigns.